Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl
January 10, 2022
Ukrainian novelist Kamysh makes his English-language debut with this evocative portrait of Chornobyl’s Exclusion Zone, the 1,000-square-mile site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, and the “illegal tourists” who explore it for days and weeks at a time. Mixing travelogue and reportage, Kamysh, whose father helped clear the site of contaminated debris, finds a stark metaphor for post-Soviet depravity in the derelict world he explores. He describes hiking 20 miles through waist-deep snow to climb 500-foot radar antennae; sleeping in an abandoned building near the rotting corpse of a wolf; being ambushed by police; and his “radiation fetishism” for contaminated graphite rods and “still glowing” liquidator’s helmets. He also makes bitter fun of “rich girls” who map “every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram” and foreigners who dress for January snowdrifts “in proper autumn camo with anti-mosquito mesh,” and draws vivid character sketches of squatters and looters such as Kolia America, who races around at night on a scooter looking for scrap metal. Though some of Kamysh’s stylistic mannerisms grate, he captures the zone’s strange mix of beauty and bleakness with precision. It’s a captivating study of “the most exotic place on Earth.” Photos.
January 15, 2022
Confessions of a Zoneaholic. Ukrainian writer Kamysh makes his book debut with a raw account of his journeys as an illegal tourist--"a stalker, a walker, a tracker, an idiot"--in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the bleak area surrounding the site of the 1986 disaster at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. His father, a civil engineer, had been a liquidator at the site for six weeks, "when you could still get fried by radiation." Now Kamysh, and those he guides, see the Zone as a destination for grungy adventures. In abandoned towns "overtaken by desolation and death," they go to "guzzle down cheap vodka, smash windows with empty bottles, curse way too loudly and do other things that distinguish living towns from dead ones." Kamysh paints a picture--and includes his own photographs--of a stark, surreal landscape: empty apartments where he finds syringes and dead animals (including the rotting corpse of a wolf); crumbling houses with moss-covered roofs; and bars "where smugglers, looters, and border guards all booze together." Although he repeatedly vows never to step foot in the Zone again, he cannot resist its allure. He has gone to the Zone in the dead of winter, stomping into an endless blizzard, freezing through the night. "We know how stupid our escapades are," Kamysh writes, but his own motivation is not merely to experience extreme tourism. He revels in a feeling of "true alienation: treading unfamiliar paths and sinking into swamps without a compass or a map, looking up at the stars you know nothing about." In sparsely repopulated villages and secluded borderlands, following the paths of smugglers looking for scrap metal, Kamysh admits he is looking for "something unattainable"--an antidote, perhaps, to complacency and consumerism. Illegal tourists revive dead cities. "They breathe life into the empty shells of fragile houses" and make the Zone "a place worth living for." Translators Leliv and Costigan-Humes capture Kamysh's angry, sometimes hauntingly rueful prose. A visceral, graphic report from dystopia.
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